Page 209 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

Mrs. Dalloway Went That-A-Way! 197

to the pavement by a woman falling, nude descending staircase,
shouting, “I will never surrender.”
A policeman came up, walked up, sidled up, himself, a frontal
male god attending on the female deities that had fallen, temporar-
ily, for the evening, like Mrs. D who did not drink, not ever, no sir,
and, if I were the IRA, his mother had said to Huxted, had chal-
lenged him, two minutes before her fall, and if you were England,
I’d never let you win. Win what, he wondered. What is the nature
of resistance? What is it that people, women, resist, like Clarissa
Dalloway resisting herself?
At least, he knew, Mrs. Dalloway had a past, savory with
choices. Riley had the novel, Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway,
in his jacket pocket the way Virginia Woolf carried rocks in her coat
pockets. They both, Huxted and Riley, not Mrs. D, had read it; and
Huxted had moved on to that novel that won the prize by that hand-
some writer, whose name I can’t remember, who is on the best-seller list
with that book whose title I can’t remember, Huxted had said in the
bookstore, trying to buy the book from a half-remembered review,
that is not about Virginia Woolf but is sort of a spin on Virginia Woolf,
you know, but the bookstore clerk did not know, kept typing on the
keyboard of his computer, hitting search, and kept insisting that
they had five copies of Virginia Woolf in the store, sir, “Orlando,” “A
Room of One’s Own,” and, and, and Huxted, frustrated, had kept
insisting that Virginia Woolf hadn’t written the book, but, oh,
then, as part of his ritual abasement before the rising goddesses,
so they would not be correct about one more angry male, he had
apologized to the clerk recently graduated from MacDonald’s say-
ing, I should have written the title down, everything whirls by so fast,
the holidays, the internet, the satellite dish, I’m not sure where I am
in time and space, in California, I know, but I mean where in time,
memory and all that, yes, of course, but more, where exactly in time
on the big clock, actual clock, to the theater-wide TV screen, virtual
clock, which knows all time the same, because, he laughed, ha ha ha,
his voice like bright water rushing fresh over stones, at himself,

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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